Thursday, 30 January 2014

Edit: the first sentence is somewhat mistaken, so please disregard it if you will.

Despite the name leading us to believe that it'll feature gameplay similar to the Age of Empires series, Hopeabandoner is evidently aiming for his RTS to be more like the Starcraft series, which kind of disappointed me since I'm rather fond of the former. There's also some plans for "original elements", which probably have something to do with unit customization (something that's been available since 1999 in Warzone 2100, along with a crapton of other RTS games). Even so, the pony fandom doesn't have enough real time strategy games and it would be nice to actually see one get finished for once, so...

From what I've seen, this is a fairly generic pony platformer with multiple characters and, surprisingly enough, local multiplayer (although I haven't really gotten the chance to try it out yet, as usual). Dunno if this'll go anywhere or not, but Hopeabandoner's other main fangame project looks much more promising so I'll be posting about it next.

He also made this creepypasta named BENT.EXE, but I dunno if I'll ever get around to posting it.

As far as 3D creepypastas go, newcomer Goerge's marathon entry is pretty standard fare: it stars a defenceless Lyra recolour who wanders about her dreamscape and collects glowing rocks, only for things to get progressively worse as she does so. We'veseenthisbefore, of course, but does Island of Falling Stars live up to its comrades?

Wednesday, 29 January 2014

As can be gathered from the game's announcement on Tumblr, Magic Hexagon is basically an open source clone of Super Hexagon with pony cutie marks, placing it under the "barely pony related" category. There's not really much to offer for feedback here without either essentially reviewing the original or commenting on the developer's taste in libraries/programming languages, although it would be nice to have some more variety when it comes to songs (the creator is looking for a musician though, so that might be resolved in the near future), along with pre-compiled OS X and Linux binaries in the near future.

Tuesday, 28 January 2014

Jach Marsdonpone (primarily known as the developer of No Guns in Canterlot and A World You Should Not Know, now a member of Silly Mare Games) decided to make his own entry for the marathon, and it basically came out as a more boring version of My Little Hang Glider. You float like some kind of really fat duck, touch colourful balls and fly past the occasional incoming projectile with your boost (the aforementioned floatiness prevents you from simply dodging them like in most games). Also, those pretty clouds? They constantly obscure your vision and the interface, rendering the latter almost utterly useless a lot of the time.

So...yeah, it'd probably be for the best if you skipped this one. Jach's other games are much more entertaining (even if they aren't quite as pretty as this one, which I'd say is probably the most visually appealing game in the marathon), so why don't you try them out instead?

The brainchild of Supertrentyguy, Lyra and Bon Bon Save the World is a fairly standard side-scrolling platformer/shooter with some absurdly huge jumps and mostly offscreen action, since spamming bullets on the first few levels will usually take out most enemies before you even see them. Still, with fixed controls and better level design this could make for a rather entertaining fangame, although I doubt it'd ever end up matching something like Megapony.

Monday, 27 January 2014

I was pleasantly surprised to hear that futzi01 would be participating in the MLGD marathon; this odd little game of interplanetary golf is probably one of his better recent creations (most of which were unfortunately a tad dull). It starts off well enough and introduces some interesting gameplay mechanics as it goes along, but suffers from a massive difficulty spike partway through the game that would make bring the chosen undead to his knees. This probably has something to do with the game's being created within several days and there not being too much time for playtesting, so it's still pretty impressive: just don't expect a superbly polished experience.

Sunday, 26 January 2014

Xinef's main entry into the marathon also proves to be one of Silly Mare Games' first forays into multiplatform development; no longer will users of Unix-like operating systems have to run their games at abysmally low framerates. Even those of you who don't care about such things should still enjoy this fun little deathmatch game, especially since Xinef is planning on adding online multiplayer in a future update (whereas for now you'll have to either find someone to play with or exploit the AI's shortcomings).

I'll probably review this once they add online multiplayer, but if you can find a friend to play it with I'd highly recommend giving Forward to the Past a shot.

Billing itself as a SFW-ish parody of shipping-centric visual novels, the Super Ethical Shipping Climax demo is an awkward jumble of borrowed vectors, annoying placeholder music and plenty of fourth wall-breaking dialogue. This might sound bad, and from several perspectives it leaves a lot to be desired, but to be honest I rather enjoyed this weird little MLGD Marathon entry in spite of (or perhaps partially because of) its shortcomings. Perhaps that's what the developers intended in the first place?

Since this is only a demo there are several missing endings and whatnot, although I hope they leave in several of the blank scenes in which the narrator laments their lack of a visual artist.

When Wishdream announced Part 2 of the My Little Game Dev Marathon, he said that sites would have to wait a couple days after the event's end to post things while he whipped up a compilation video. Thing is, "a couple days" turned into two bloody weeks, and the video purposefully leaves out several key games to make room for ones that were either a part of the previous marathon or not even entries at all, but separate games that he just decided to throw in there. I'd say that's more than a tad dishonest: kind of makes me wish that I'd never agreed to wait for this in the first place (especially since it comes out on Sunday, which of all days is supposed to be my day off).

Given how poorly things were handled I'm not even going to bother posting the video, so I'll just post the games separately and give them the attention they deserve instead of shoving them all into one big compilation post.

Saturday, 25 January 2014

Given the heavy load that Legends of Equestria's servers are under, it was a wonder I was able to get into the game at all. Many were not so fortunate; I've heard of people who literally spent several hours trying to log in before giving up, and over the weekend things are probably going to get even worse as people use their day off school/work to participate in the open server weekend.

Aside from the connectivity issues (which are to be expected, given the game's current popularity), how good is Legends of Equestria in its current state? You can find my thoughts on it below the break.

Thursday, 23 January 2014

On Friday at 12:01AM EST the Legends of Equestria open server weekend will presumably begin, provided that their servers can handle the load. Even now they are crumbling under the weight of thousands rushing to download the MMO's client in preparation for the big day, and quite probably things will only get worse come tomorrow. Still, if you do actually manage to get in and play for a bit you'll be able to experience lawyer-friendly locations such as Ponydale, Cantermore and the Evershade Forest, and thanks to the /stuck command earth ponies will no longer be subject to eternal damnation in Tartarus.

You can download the game here and read their exclamation mark-riddled announcement post here, but I'll copy & paste some of it below just in case the site goes down.

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

A while back a group calling themselves Overmare Studios were working on a Fallout 3 mod with ponies, but eventually decided to move to the Unity3D engine and release a standalone game based off of the influential fanfiction Fallout: Equestria. Months of painstaking development lead to this video, showcasing the incredible, never-before-seen ability of picking objects without resorting to hands or magnetic hooves: magic (i.e. how Gordon Freeman picks up the can before he is given the Gravity Gun). Hopefully this will lead to HL2-like shenanigans such as tossing kitchen sinks at hostile wasteland inhabitants, but even if it doesn't there should still be plenty of fun to be had...hopefully.

It's more than a bit early to form a real opinion on the game, although I do have doubts about the team's ability to create enough textures, given the probable size of the game.

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

The web-based PonyRL project seems to have made a decent amount of progress since we last looked at it back in August, with several more playable classes and scenarios for the player to unlock. It's still pretty basic as far as roguelikes go, however; enemies are mostly stationary, there aren't really any NPCs for the player to interact with, and you aren't likely to get sick from eating orc carcases. Newcomers from the genre should find it fairly easy to get into, although after a while it might leave them wishing for something a bit more...substantial. Might have something to do with the game's still being in beta.

Then again, it could just be that the later stages are all much better and I just suck too much at the game to get to them, who knows?

Friday, 10 January 2014

On November 30th, with little ado some anon released an online pony-themed geopolitics game, only for it to suddenly explode with popularity the next next day (mainly via word of mouth, despite an almost complete lack of media attention). >CLOP has seen some major improvements and feature updates since we last posted about it: war, natural disasters, Solar Empire/New Lunar Republic factions, etc, so if even if you have tried the game already I'd still recommend going back to it and giving it another shot.

Maybe I should try playing it myself...then again, I'd probably get sucked in and never come out alive.

Thursday, 9 January 2014

If you've been following the Spike's Quest blog, you may have heard that its creator was alternating between working on it and a side-project titled Castle Pinkiestein, a first-person shooter/puzzle game starring Twilight Sparkle as the protagonist, trapped inside some sort of cruel nightmare in which she is forced to kill mutated Pinkie Pie clones. Aside from this there really isn't much else for info on the game (aside from what we've heard of it formerly being a minigame in Spike's Quest), so I guess we'll just have to wait for now and see how the project turns out.

My apologies for the overall lack of content lately as well, I'm just waiting for the My Little Game Dev Marathon to finish so I can post about the results (it officially ends at some point tomorrow, which will be followed by a one or two day delay until I get the go-ahead to write the compilation post).

Thursday, 2 January 2014

Despite the infamous Pony Creator utility being the most commonly-used of, well, pony creators, there are still a fair amount of people who prefer the Pony Avatar Creator demo for various reasons (even if its pony model looks a bit off, and it doesn't have a really wide variety of manes or accessories). The creator could have kept it in its current state and simply added more stuff, but it seems he has other plans for it and is in the process of transforming it into a full-fledged web service called Equestria Jukebox, with chat rooms and whatnot.

Will this take off? We'll see once the open alpha comes out, but in the meantime you can find an exclusive sneak peak of the service below the break.